Territorial exceptionalism is reproduced post-Insular Cases – respect for self-determination is weaponized for discrimination.

But as David Alan Sklansky presciently wrote of Korematsu two years before Trump v. Hawaii overturned it, “[j]udicial overruling is not the only way that a decision can lose its status as ‘law.’”380 If the goal is to actually resolve the territories’ present colonial condition, then Aurelius gives us every reason to believe that inviting federal judges to shoot first and ask questions later is a terrible strategy. Turning the page requires us to think much harder about the tangled web of interests that have surfaced in overseas imperialism’s wake and the many possible post-Insular Cases worlds that the judiciary could fashion, including those where territorial exceptionalism finds a new home within the text.381

By the same token, it requires deeper thinking about how to ask courts to appreciate and honor those interests without licensing permanent and unreviewable colonialism or talismanic constitutional opt-outs. Judge Lucero’s highly idealized picture of the Insular Cases’ framework—namely, its capacity to be “repurposed” in the name of “respect” for local autonomy and Indigenous selfdetermination—is frequently weaponized as a justification for blind [uninformed] 'judicial acceptance of relationships plainly rooted in invidious discrimination.382 Similarly, the unqualified position advanced by the American Samoan government that “the political branches rather than the courts are best positioned to consider the wishes of the American Samoan people” may be of use in the instant litigation,383 but ignores the plain institutional reality that accompanies the territories’ disenfranchisement in the nation’s political process.384